Video production and broadcasting has been a pervasive part of the western world since its inception. Image based content production has experienced a long and consistent evolution since its introduction in the mid-19th century, when inventions such as the phenakistoscope and zoetrope demonstrated that a carefully designed sequence of drawings, showing phases of the changing appearance of objects in motion, would appear to show the objects actually moving if they were displayed one after the other at a sufficiently rapid rate. These early devices, like modern devices, relied on the phenomenon of persistence of vision to make the display appear continuous even though the observer's view was actually blocked as each drawing rotated into the location where its predecessor had just been glimpsed. In the late 1870s Eadweard Muybridge created the first animated image sequences photographed in real-time. A row of cameras was used, each in turn capturing one image on a glass photographic plate, so the total number of images in each sequence was limited by the number of cameras, about two dozen at most.
By the end of the 1880s, the introduction of lengths of celluloid photographic film and the invention of motion picture cameras, which could photograph an indefinitely long rapid sequence of images using only one lens, allowed several minutes of action to be captured and stored on a single compact reel of film. Some early films were made to be viewed by one person at a time through a “peep show” device such as the Kinetoscope. Others were intended for a projector, mechanically similar to the camera and sometimes actually the same machine, which was used to shine an intense light through the processed and printed film and into a projection lens so that these “moving pictures” could be shown tremendously enlarged on a screen for viewing by an entire audience. The first public exhibition of projected motion pictures in America was at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City on the 23 of Apr. 1896.
The earliest films were simply one static shot that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. Around the turn of the 20th century, films started stringing several scenes together to tell a story. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots photographed from different distances and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were developed as effective ways to tell a story with film. Until sound film became commercially practical in the late 1920s, motion pictures were a purely visual art, but these innovative silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination. Rather than leave audiences with only the noise of the projector as an accompaniment, theater owners hired a pianist or organist or, in large urban theaters, a full orchestra to play music that fit the mood of the film at any given moment. By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music to be used for this purpose, and complete film scores were composed for major productions.
In the 1920s, the development of electronic sound recording technologies made it practical to incorporate a soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. The resulting sound films were initially distinguished from the usual silent “moving pictures” or “movies” by calling them “talking pictures” or “talkies.” The revolution they wrought was swift. By the 1930, silent film was practically extinct in the US and already being referred to as “the old medium”. Another major technological development was the introduction of “natural color,” which meant color that was photographically recorded from nature rather than added to black-and-white prints by hand-coloring, stencil-coloring or other arbitrary procedures, although the earliest processes typically yielded colors which were far from “natural” in appearance.
The first television broadcast of video was in 1925 by the British Broadcast Corporation. Ever since audio/video was introduced to the masses in the early 1900's, audio/video production techniques and the content formats they produce (audio, video, multimedia, etc.) have continued to rapidly and consistently evolve. Today's audio/video offerings, generally referred to as media, go far beyond the early days of “moving pictures” to include everything from simple audio/video recording to composite real videos with integrated or overlaid digital three dimensional animations, and even tactile and smell sensor stimulation.
Video Production is also known as videography. Technically, it is the process of creating video by capturing moving images, and creating combinations of parts of this video in live production and post-production (video editing). In most cases the captured video will be recorded on electronic media such as video tape, hard disk, or solid state storage, but it might only be distributed electronically without being recorded. It is the equivalent of filmmaking, but with images recorded electronically instead of film stock.
Practically, video production is the art and service of creating content and delivering a finished video product. This can include production of television programs, television commercials, corporate videos, event videos, wedding videos and special-interest home videos. A video production can range in size from a family making home movies with a prosumer camcorder, a one solo camera operator with a professional video camera in a single-camera setup (aka a “one-man band”), a videographer with a sound person, to a multiple-camera setup shoot in a television studio to a production truck requiring a whole television crew for an electronic field production (EFP) with a production company with set construction on the back lot of a movie studio.
Styles or techniques of “shooting” (using a camera to acquire video content) include on a tripod (aka “sticks”) for a locked-down shot; hand-held to attain a more jittery camera angle or looser shot, incorporating Dutch angle, Whip pan and whip zoom; on a jib that smoothly soars to varying heights; and with a Steadicam for smooth movement as the camera operator incorporates cinematic techniques moving through rooms. Content can be captured and produced according to a large and ever-growing number of audio/video formats or schemes. There is also an extensive and ever-growing set of techniques for both video acquisition and editing, where each technique is designed and intended to evoke a specific set of sensations or feelings within a viewer. Most content formats and acquisition/editing techniques are taught in film/video production courses or may be learned from textbooks on the subject. However, to date, there is no system or software which allows a layman or novice to produce audio/video content according to a preselected format and/or style.